Historic Photos of Samia Gamal

This photo shows a close up of Samia Gamal wearing a stunning costume.

She wore this costume in the 1944 film Man Al Jani (Who's The Criminal?) In this movie, she danced barefoot, something that was unusual at the time. This clip shows Samia performing her dance scene in the movie. The stars of that movie were Anwar Wagdy, Amina Rizk, and Ismael Yassin. This is one of Samia's earliest films when she was only about 19 or 20 years old. She doesn't have an acting part in it, and only appears in one dancing scene which is the engagement party for a couple who is going to be married. The guests are laughing because they are thoroughly enjoying the dancer's performance. An elderly couple is particularly tickled about it because they are from a village and rarely have the chance to see a belly dancer like Samia's character.

After doing a barefoot performance, Samia was eventually given the nickname "the barefoot dancer" and rumors began to circulate that she couldn't afford shoes. Samia confronted these rumors in a later interview in Kawakeb magazine, saying that at the time of the rumors she could easily afford to buy every single shoe in the Bata Shoe store window.

At that time period most dancers wore shoes. If you look at all the pictures of Badia Masabni's dancers at her clubs, you'll see them wearing shoes pretty much all the time.

The caption in Arabic says:

"Samia Gamal arrived several days ago in Paris to work on the film Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves featuring the famous French movie star Fernandel in the leading role. In this photo, Samia Gamal demonstrates her joy at having arrived in Paris by doing a baladi dance in the middle of the Champs Elysees in front of a traffic cop who stares at her with admiration and astonishment. Behind them is the Arc de Triomphe."

The movie was released in 1954. Because Samia did not speak French, her only lines in the movie were to say, "Ali Baba! Ali Baba!"

These two photos of Samia Gamal with Angelo Boyadjian were taken in 1950. Angelo was the brother and business parter of famed Armenian/Egyptian photographer Levon Boyadjian, also known as "Van Leo".

Many of the most well known celebrity photographs of that time period were taken by one of the two brothers at Studio Angelo in Cairo. They were renowned for their photographs of Omar Sharif, Samia Gamal, Farid al-Atrache, and other celebrities. Eventually, they split up and each one opened his own studio.

Angelo left Egypt in 1960 and lived out the rest of his days in Paris.

Van Leo, on the other hand, remained in Cairo. However, as the years passed, he was forgotten and most of the customers who came to his studio only wanted passport photos. Nobody dreamed that he had once hobnobbed with the stars of the Golden Era.

Van Leo's legacy was forgotten until he received a visit in the 1990s by a professor from the American University in Cairo. He introduced the professor to a treasure trove of photographs that were worth much more than a thousand words.